That's the opposite of the criticism that was levelled at him, during earlier launches, when he was preferring his own cameras even though they only caught fog.

The streams are great, I just wish they were streamed on youtube like they used to be.

That’s sounds perfect. No “commentators” no “own angles”, no “buy our merch”, no whining about “my crappy blackmagic camera may have been damaged”

Here is the unofficial NASASpaceFlight stream: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9gDxG-pm1Zo

They are already live and have a lot of background discussion, unlike the official SpaceX stream.

Only on X, sadly.

And it's SpaceX, not ESA, sadly.

The X video stream is flawless.

Yeah, the NSF cast quality is more amateurish, and certain cast members aren't that good at doing live casting. But it's nice listening to like minded people. And their camera shots are beautiful.

YouTube rebroadcast of official SpaceX feed (h/t NasaSpaceFlight forums):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmkHjDeECps

Also hosted directly on SpaceX website:

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14

I use to watch the nasaspaceflight and everyday astronaut streams but the official one is best for the actual launch. The other two are good for the commentary because if you ask a question in the chat they’ll sometimes answer it.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14

It’s big.

36 full flow staged combustion engines all working is no easy feat

Thanks for actually answering

I think for a sense of scale if this works as the SpaceX team wants, they will be able to launch more mass to orbit in a single day than all payloads ever before 2022 (rough math). And at a cost roughly 1/100th the prior average.

Also getting to "orbit" is a huge feat, because you need to be going over 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h), get into a designated orbit, and in this case, they're also deploying starlink satellites.

This rocket is the largest rocket ever made by humans, and the largest to even reach orbit, which is insane considering it's by a private company and not a national space program.

Blowing something up so hard it almost gets into space is a feat of engineering, even if all it does is rain debris from ahigh.

An interesting theory. Intelligence tends towards entropy in the absence of exciting stimuli. Maybe life on Earth has just been so besieged over the eons that it has forced us to progress to where we are. Once we reach [Wall-E levels of comfort and abundance,](https://corporalculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/walle...) we're doomed. Maybe we're already seeing this with the fertility crisis.

On a smaller scale, driving through the mountains and seeing the tunnels where we said "screw it, we're going through" is also pretty amazing.

One thing that made me realize the scale of the Apollo project was the "rubber room". This is a bunker connected by a slide to the launch pad. It was designed as an emergency escape in case of an imminent explosion.

At a normal scale, that would be a major construction project.

At Apollo scale, it is an anecdote. Its purpose is to maybe save a few people in the unlikely scenario where an explosion gives enough advance warning to be able to use the slide, but not enough to be able to just drive away. It also goes to show that the program was anything but reckless.

"nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9"

well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space

The reusability is what made the rest of these investments possible. Musk is annoying, but you have to give him credit for it.

If you get the chance to see it in person, it's an experience. The best way I can describe it is that looking from Isla Blanca beach, it looks like a skyscraper sitting on the pad, and then, the impossible happens -- the skyscraper lifts off into the sky.

That is operational flights, today’s is still a test. Splashdowns today.

Those were parts taken from this video: https://www.spacex.com/content/starship/holy-grail-of-rocket...

Yeah and v3 has 10x downlink capacity and 20x uplink capacity of the v2.

I think somebody on the livestream said 60x capacity over Falcon.

>Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.

F9 fits how many?

Zero. Starlink v3 is too big for the F9 payload fairing. It's not just a matter of mass, the diameter and overall volume is important as well. In terms of performance, last I read they're supposed to add 1 Tbps of capacity each, so assuming they all work the first time all 26 would be around 10x the network addition of a full F9 v2 Mini launch. But the larger antennas would have other advantages beyond sheer bandwidth, and they'll be able to start getting more serious about direct to cell.

One can only hope

Surely AI stands for "American Intelligence"! Renaming incoming, Google will comply first.

Depends on what the issue is, but you don't need to apply fixes to the next launch. You test them when you can, which may tax a few launches.

The last few missions have been successful at the primary objectives so there's not necessarily a pressing need to fix anything before the next launch.

They already leap frog fixes and improvements based on previous flights on all their launches.

How can you compare the economics of it if you just have the bandwidth and not the cost?

Limits are security. Dont have to do this, don't have to risk that, no need for uncertainty, anxiety won't kill the weak confused mind...you can't fail if you never try (big brain!). That's the type. It is called cowards ;)

Totally, just like all the haters of the Hyperloop!

"It's unreasonable to say starship can't work in a world where the Saturn V did work."

Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.

I don't doubt Starship, BTW. Great project.

I agree on all points. That said, we're seeing a lot of preparatory activity from many places. SpaceX, Google, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, Orbital Compute, Odyssey, and China’s ADA Space/Zhejiang Lab. SpaceX and Blue Origin have filed plans for huge orbital compute constellations. Google is developing TPU-equipped satellites under Project Suncatcher. Starcloud has already flown an Nvidia H100 in orbit. China’s ADA Space has also launched a small network of AI-compute satellites. A lot of very smart and very rich people are making big bets in this space.

We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.

funny that skeptics didn't pile on Google for the same plans... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...

A better comparison would be Starlink, which had a bunch of unresolved problems and had to be more economical than existing satellite internet providers.

Starlink is "networking in space". The compute, power, and heat stories are minor compared to the networking benefits. Different story than making compute cheaper in space.

For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.

Tough problem, however it is notable that after SpaceX, there are now several other companies with similar plans, including Google: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...

One interpretation is they're all delusional. Another is that Musk showed the way and others now see it too.

You’re right, I’m just back from the city, took no time and was so cheap thanks to the hyperloop. Next week I go to Asia, I think I will use the rocket transport system Musk announced a few years ago. It’s so nice how my Tesla is making me so much money while I’m traveling, offering taxi service to everybody around. Next will I will get the add-on to have it join the Tesla compute fleet - it’s free compute if you think about it, given the solar roof is generating the energy! Might even get one of those humanoid robot to replace me at work. Just hope it’s not raining too much, my cybertruck steel plates are rusting a bit. Also, my kids are really enjoying their summer camp at the Mars colony!

mpv https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMPMQxB

works beautifully

Watching that take off is breathtaking. I've been a space nerd since a little kid and I cannot believe how cool this is. Fuck yeah!

Status update: It launched. Looks very good so far. At nearly 100km altitude four minutes in, most engines nominal. Superheavy separated successfully.

Inspiring to watch, really.

They're being careful because they don't want to wreck their launch pad.

On the previous flight, they were going for the same ocean soft landing as this flight, but several engines on the booster failed to start during the landing burn (reportedly due to ice clogging propellant feed). Had this crash not happened they likely would have tried for a tower catch today.

They want to be sure the mitigation for this failure worked before they put the pad & tower at risk.

In one sense, yes. But Elon's PoV is "I have a big Booster factory, I'm a trillionaire, and my unit cost is under $50M." Vs. fixing a smashed Tower (and surrounding launch infrastructure) would likely cost him months.

It’s a go!

Yeah it's a great way to learn a small bit of the unintuitive aspects of spaceflight. Though real launches follow a much more refined trajectory than most KSP but yeah the basic steps are still the same, though often blended together IRL due to limits on deep throttling and available relights for real rocket engines (though with mods you too can experience the need to do that in KSP, along with fun problems like ullage burns to settle fuel).

You should try out Kerbal Space Program you'll learn all about it. The rocket is perpendicular to the ground so the burn adds speed, and altitude on the other side of the orbit.

I haven't watched the footage yet, but if they were already at apopasis (highest point in orbit), orbital insertion would primarily raise the periapsis (lowest point) on the other side of the planet, so very little altitude change would be seen. It would be mostly an increase in velocity.

I think the mission was deliberately designed to get to just-below-orbit, have a decision point, and then proceed to orbit. So thats why it was a short burn. Because just-below-orbit is safer if anything goes wrong, they had a little pause.

edit: Also, Orbit is mostly a sideways speed thing rather than a height thing. The aim is to be "going sideways so fast that even though you are falling, you keep missing"

Confirmed, orbit!

Hell yeah, that was the longest 10 minutes.

near-orbit with one vacuum engine failing

near-orbit was planned, they just had to burn longer. It's in the timeline: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14

But yeah, they had a big decision to make in those few minutes between engine cutoff ang insertion burn.

Not a fan of Elon Musk at all, but SpaceX is damn impressive. Watching these key launches always makes me emotional for our species and what we can accomplish together.

I tuned in at T+11 just in time to hear the announcer talking about splashdown in the Indian ocean and that they weren't going to orbit today, followed immediately by saying the team is still considering options and trying to find a way to get to orbit. We'll see what happens.

T+22: Go for orbit!

go for orbit!!!

The OP will go on or not, I don't need to think high or low of Mask

As far as space goes, there isn't any. The closest is Falcon Heavy, which turned out much more complicated and expensive than originally expected. But it flies.

Failure is a part of life and is one aspect of our growth as humans. If one has never failed then one has probably never attempted to do much in life.

Noted failure Babe Ruth struck out 1330 times, which was a record that lasted until Mickey Mantle failed even harder.

But it happened still.

That's a bad comparison. Falcon 9 wasn't developed to be reusable. And it it didn't actually take that long. Also Starship has already proven that Starship booster can land. And Starship itself has cleanly landed on the ocean.

There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.

The craziest part about FSD is that people still think it doesn't work.

The fact that you can pay the average price for a car, and get a car that fully drives itself today, is mind boggling.

FSD is on the path of being incredibly successful. You really have to try it, if you haven't already.

Boring Company is also on the path to being successful, it's just not advertised much.

Solar roof - yes, this one I would mark as a failure.

Cybertruck - they're still selling, so not a failure. But not as great as originally promised.

Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.

Nobody is saying he's god. But maybe, he understands engineering better than some commenters on HN, that's all.

i personally wanted those to work (except Twitter, i believe social media is net net bad for society)... and yet i don't feel the need to jerk him off with my hands

Oh, it's only the second best selling electric truck on the market. What a massive failure.

It sold so well that Musk had to have SpaceX buy up millions and millions worth of unsold inventory.

Starlink is just the civil version of Starshield. As long as the US Army needs unrestricted internet access across the globe Starlink will continue to exist.

The vast majority of that market is too poor to afford Starlink and as soon as they're not, their top priority will be to invest the capex to replace it with the vastly superior terrestrial modalities.

Starlink has about 13 million subscribers today and makes around 500$/year net on average per subscriber. It's still growing fast and will get faster and more reliable. You will also be able to use from your phone quite soon. It can very realistically get to 100 million subscribers which is going to generate 50 billion/year of profit. They have 0 competition in that space. Even if they make half of that it's still a 1 trillion dollar company right there.

You are saying "sub-fiber" but Starlink will likely be faster for long round trips once enough new gen satellites are deployed.

That comes before the whole datacenters in space conversation.

It won't get axed, the race with China is on.

Now the point of economic sustainability was always putting Starlink into orbit. That's something people in the space community have said from the beginning.

And both the booster and the Starship itself have proven that they can get back to ground mostly intact. So its not like they are only working on 'getting to orbit'. And clearly it is leading something desirable if the have proven that they can basically land the second and first stage, something nobody else has ever achieved.

Question how fast they can make the turn around are still there along with other question. But once you can repeatably launch you can improve much faster as they did with Falcon 9. And you can do more and more tests in shorter time, accelerating development.

So reply to the immediately following sentence that asks you to connect the milestone to the next.

I'm glad they gathered the courage to go for orbit and launched these v3 satellites so they can test real deployment of starlink v3. A bit of a cliffhanger for a few moments there. The starlink v3 direct-to-cell coverage will be a big upgrade when it comes online, allowing users without a terminal to use the constellation. And the laser based inter satellite communication is a big upgrade to how v3 can communicate. The catch, landing and recovery of both stages will be big next steps.

SpaceX knows that pulling the risk out of system is the ask here and they continue to progress and push their limits and capabilities, which is a healthy sign for the US space industry and more broadly for technical progress worldwide.

Putting Starlink sats in orbit is the economic engine that pays for Starship development and infrastructure build-out. You really think you get to skip straight to the end goal without establishing a way to fund it?

And it's amazing how much easier it is to test and iterate when you're making regular flights.

Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.

Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.

I never forget either. Both were failures of the command/service module design, not the rocket.

That's an incredible achievement. But you seem to be ignoring the goals of Starship program - to make economically viable and reusable means of space transportation.

It's like after Jobs unveils iPhone to the world you'd comment that, meh, we could make telephone calls more than 100 years ago?

This comparison would make sense if we'd been giving Elon 5% of the federal budget like we did to the Apollo mission.

Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.

An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.

"Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system."

You can probably prolong the stack, exactly as they did with Falcon. Also, Raptor 3 is more powerful than previous models, and I would expect future Raptor 4 to add some oomph as well.

"But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications."

Uh, isn't Starbase evidence to the contrary? They can produce rockets and rocket engines faster than anyone else in the world. And Raptor unit cost is ridiculously low for a liquid rocket engine.

"That alone justifies..."

...keeping whatever project that should've been put to sleep months ago alive. Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up. That's often accompanied by isolated economic arguments that are fragments of what started out as a coherent business case that can no longer be supported.

This post feels like written by a QA. This is their first semi operational flight . In its current state starship is a reason to be proud by any nation . It pushed science forward with cost and payload size never possible before . That’s only current state .

Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.

They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.

they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system

In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.

Aged like Milk (in the desert), orbit and all payload successfully deployed. Elon hater flagged.

I wonder how this type of comment would apply to software development world where something innovative is being built, currently not ideal but the devs would just look at it: Meh, it doesn't do X, it doesn't do Y, it does Z worse and it doesn't send email!

Maybe AI applies here - from a few years of supercharged intellisense to builds stuff on its own. But even here I don't remember such a skepticism some folks are aiming at Starship.

It's like running into R&D department and just pointing out at the flaws/not implemented features while you iterate on your product. Annoying.

This was such a long time coming!

Czechia has a state holiday (St. Wenceslas), so people are watching :)

It's an early AM launch. Alarm clocks on the west coast haven't gone off yet

What if I told you every bucket within about 4 light years of us is known to have no water, no air, and hot/cold as hell? And even the worst part of the current bucket is better than any other bucket we know of?

Speaking as a bucket who, within, holds many crabs, I think the crabs inside me could make me (the bucket) MUCH nicer than any of these other, more desolate, buckets nearby. Instead of investing untold wealth into navigating towards these far off buckets that currently are full of holes, and cannot house crabs, it would be much cheaper to make me (the bucket the crabs are in) very nice for all of the crabs.

It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.

I bet an underlying thought is that we crabs will have to finance the entire Mars colony adventure through taxes and incentives and subsidies and whatnot.

To your first point: yes, that's the whole idea and it's been the same playbook for any colony from the Americas to Australia. Mars is a much bigger challenge but our technology has advanced enough to make this possible. Let those who would dare risk their lives to achieve something great do so. If you don't want to participate then you don't have to, this isn't a national or international project so you can safely sit it out.

To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.

Like pioneering the first excellent electric car?

Elon is the world's biggest stan (who is actually doing things rather than just talking about it) for solar power and electrification of transport, how is that a call for inaction?

Assuming you are talking about climate change: isn’t Tesla doing more than anyone to electrify everything and help fix the problem?

The plan definitely does not call for inaction towards other issues.

A ridiculous claim.

That doesn't make much sense, a previously private corporation (which just recently went public) is achieving economical launch to orbit and has made continual progress on that front over decades while politics has both worked for and against them. To me, that is a refutation of "launching things into orbit is politics" especially when you compare the very politically entangled incumbents' launch cadence and capacity.

Calm down. V-2 was a missile whose very design intent was to kill people.

If Starship ever kills people, it will be a disaster, but not intent.

This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.

I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor. Sailors are pretty happy too.

This is ballistics weapons technology

It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!

Starship wouldn't be a very effective missile IMO.

Yeah like how the Nazis celebrated rocketry. You can’t decouple being an asshole.

Very excited. Watching it with my wife. So glad it didn't have to end early.

It's 6:30am here in CA, didn't get any indication it was going to be this early until I just saw this.

I think there are so many more mission objectives for success, e.g., still in payload deploy. I think we've already reached a lot of milestones with this launch, but there's still a lot of satellites to go at the time of writing. I'm so used to these failing that I'm holding my breath until everything is done.

If it isn't human landing on Moon/Mars then I can wait for weekly space news write-up on Ars Technica.

"Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems."

Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.

It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.

these satellites are junk anyway - and starship can't go to the moon lmao

SpaceX works at the pinnacle. Elon just goes into a K hole and comes up with ideas. Most of which are garbage.

The people doing the work at SpaceX should be applauded because they are pushing boundaries of science and technology.

There is a cadre of right wing Elon simps on HN. Ruins every thread related to Tesla/SpaceX, just emotional posts about their love of Elon, pretty sad really given Elon arguably uses other people to make himself look good.

so little activity, 55 comments

???

I mean... I'm watching it. What's there to say? Who wants to argue with Musk/Trump/detractors and their bots.

SpaceX deserves a higher caliber of hater. This low effort hate is unworthy.

At their bleeding edge, yes. Further back - their Falcon launch system is delivering far more reliably, frequently, and economically than any other launch system on Earth.

And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.

7km/s, 26 sattelites currently deploying - super impressive!

Not just US - plenty of other countries will want to do the same, and there are only going to be a couple of countries with cheap payload capability.

China launched some classified mission just last week which was quite possibly weapons for disabling other satellites.

Huge congratulations to the SpaceX team!

Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.

-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay

-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2

-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO

-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.

-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin

-- the design is validated - things will work

-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job

Caveats

-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc

-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit

-- cooling will have to be

-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works

[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.

It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?

[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?